The world has certainly evolved from the time where you could backup your customer and business data on a hard disk.
Given that even the smallest of businesses need to keep records of transactions, catalogue images, case studies and data builds ranging from video renders to raw text, backup has never been more important.
The Holy Grail of backup is that you should always have something physical at hand. The issue with this is that these days, a terabyte external hard disk does not actually go that far.
External hard disks are quite notorious for sucking power, which is a cost in itself, and you can actually get quite lost in trying to keep up to date with what you have and have not loaded onto it.
Image backups (the stuff that you can do on your computer) are rapidly falling out of favour because they are risky in terms of data loss in a catastrophic event such as total hard disk failure.
So what is the solution? All businesses need to approach a multi-approach. This needs to start with a functional data storage area – which would typically be a C: drive, the one that is used for every day functionality.
Every week, or month, this should be copied and backed up to a physical external drive. This, in turn, should be backed up onto the cloud.
There are different ways to approach this. A business can either take the approach of paying a third party provider to host their data on the cloud. There are several free or low cost solutions in this respect, but the downside is that if the provider themselves has a catastrophic event or goes out of business, then your data is not secure.
The best way to approach this, is to dedicate part of your business to hosting your data on an online server that is physically hooked up to your system. These kind of packages offer fixed guarantees to ensure that your data is kept on a physical server at your premises which is also hooked up to a cloud server as an extra layer of data retrieval security.
The truth is that with data, the more levels that you have, the better the protection that you have. Doing it yourself, or employing an in-house expert can be costly and time consuming, so your best bet is to farm this service out to a third party which will result in cheaper outgoings, better security of data, speed and system integrity.